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Tuesday, March 2, 2004

Viterbi Makes $52M Gift to USC Engineering School

Andrew Viterbi and his wife Erna have given $52M as a gift to the USC School of Engineering (www.usc.edu), endowing the school and renaming it the Viterbi School of Engineering. Viterbi, co-founder of Qualcomm (www.qualcomm.com) and Linkabit. Viterbi will also join the school as a professor of electrical engineering-systems and hold the Presidential Chair of Engineering. Viterbi graduated from USC with a PhD in Electrical Engineering in 1962, and went on to develop the information theory and the Viterbi algorithm, which was one of the key algorithms for decoding overlapping signals--the basis for CDMA and other communications protocols.